Photographic

Photographs based on or inspired by fairy tales can be regarded as a subgenre of tableau photography, a genre that combines the art form of the stage with that of photography. Over the past century and a half, the fairy tale has provided photography with multiple performative possibilities. As a medium using material bodies and objects, photography, in turn, has contributed to the reassessment of the fairy tale from the perspectives of cultural, social, political, and environmental concerns such as gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, and species. This chapter discusses fairy-tale photographs produced in Western and non-Western cultures from the mid-nineteenth century onward, from Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s portrait of a young Victorian girl posing as Little Red Riding Hood (1857), through Sarah Moon’s recasting of “Little Red Riding Hood” in a modern urban setting, to Chan-Hyo Bae’s gender- and race-bending self-portraits as fairy-tale princesses.